Bored of It

Be careful what you wish for. At least at the moment it is easy to use tools like uBlock to avoid ads but it gets more difficult if they are served as an integral part of the page from the same domain.

This is a good point. You could equally well argue that the spherical cow “ideal” 100% marketing shows you exactly the right product right as you need it. And then shuts the hell up!

100% efficient everything is an unimaginable dystopia. All that's nice, and good, all kindness and love and happiness, all that exists within economic inefficiencies. It's the slack that lets us be human.

That said, of the four examples you mentioned, only one has the distinction of being a metaphorical cancer on modern society, entrapping everything it touches in negative-sum games until it burns out all value and metastasizes to the next fertile ground. It's what ruined medium after medium, from phones through over-the-air TV, cable, web, video streaming, news, social media - and it just keeps going.

I wrote this over 5 years ago, and since then, the cancer analogy only felt ever more accurate to me: https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

I like where you're going with this - we do need an economic system that priorities people and not profits. So I hope you take this for the pedantry it is-

But the customer for an ad is the company. They are buying it, so a hypnotizing ad would be 100% effective for them.

In your version of the analogy, its what's effective for the seller- so the ad equivalent would be a situation where in order to get any sales, 100% of your margin goes towards advertising.

I'm actually convinced that "marketing", as such, can be completely orthogonal to profit altogether. Any sort of communication of a novel thing would fall under this banner, but I learn about new FOSS projects on here every day because the maintainers and developers are willing to 'advertise' them to me.

Without ads there's no craving to be filled. Without food I still die of hunger. Without pharmaceuticals I still die of sickness.

The difference is all those other things you listed - food, drugs, etc provide value. An ad provides none.

> but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart.

Exactly, it all starts to fall apart when common sense is applied - it's just that we've become horribly dependent, many even addicted to the dehumanizing grind of our beloved competition economy..

The immanent rise of autonomous machines is the sudden emergency exit from capitalism we (or rather: some of us) have been rooting for.. IF we can convince the people of this planet that a non-commercial post-scarcity open-access open-source commons economy is a more hopeful trajectory into the long future.. Let's not give up on this one yet.

I'm willing to go along with this hypothesis. So first step is to end capitalism, then we can see if we still hate ads?

Helping customers find products and services to their needs is a good and worthwhile goal. Unfortunately, the typical role of marketing is to convince people that they have problems that only the marketed product can fix.

How many marketing professionals do you know that work for non-profit providers of goods and services? I'm sure they exist, but I imagine not many.

Marketing isn't just about connecting consumers to products, it's also about creating demand.

Those aren't nearly close enough to be considered stolen. Possibly allusions (which is not stealing), but even then, the only similarity of the bests is "The best" usage. Nothing about the rest of the lines, or before, are similar enough to be "stolen" (potentially the Ginsberg troping Yeat's "full of passionate intensity" of the worst into his best's "madness, starving hysterical", but that too is allusion, not stealing).

The best lack all conviction, while the worst // Are full of passionate intensity.

vs

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, // dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

How is this stealing in any form?

He stole the concept of poetry from Yeats?

I’m a CFO that used to work in healthcare. Have had many cases where a doctor tries to explain to me how accounting “should work” and I have to tell them we have this little thing call revenue recognition or GAAP or how accruals work, etc. basically the stuff covered in accounting 101.

I’m used to fielding questions about numbers from all types but only doctors will immediately jump to telling you it’s wrong without asking questions and adamantly insisting they know the right way to do things is what I’ve noticed as a personality quirk generalization.

I'm a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist; you are correct about this illusion that physicians often labor under. But it's worth noting that when medical topics are posted here, the responses from non-physicians are sometimes so nonsensical that I for one laugh out loud reading them. In fact, I look forward to these discussions for this very reason.

The worst thing is, most doctors aren't even smart in their own domain. They are nothing more but trained monkeys who follow a flow chart that has drug sales at the end.

I'd say it's something like "a squandering of potential"

> Or would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks?

This was my experience. I’m not a programmer but I enjoy playing around with Python. I work with it a lot more and make far more complicated programs now because I don’t have to spend half an hour trying to find a solution to my problem on StackOverflow.

The issue I found is that I don’t bother trying to build anything on my own anymore, so even though I’ve learned a lot about designing programs, my knowledge of Python has probably actually declined.

> would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks?

Would even that have some downsides in the long-term, since the process of banging one's head could be crucial to rewiring your brain to understand new concepts.

Its like computing gave us the most powerful paintbrush of all time and we said, "nah, you do the painting".

> all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks?

thanks for this lil' dose of copium, so at least it qualifies as character buildup what a relief

AI is just another abstraction. It's not like a senior Java dev can implement LocalDate.now() or CompletableFuture.await()

I compare it to something like PEDs or even painkillers. These too are a fact of life, but going down that road makes a lot of decisions for you.

AI in certain hands will be fine. In other hands it will be a disaster for the person that uses it, because they will not perform the reps they need to really be able to think. Believing a computer is a magic box that gives answers is not great, it's adjacent to "believe and do what the computer tells you".

> It's 100% transactional - how can I go through this as fast as possible - as a result people fail the exams at unseen rates like 50-80% in classes that can be passed by learning a few days and doing the exercises yourself.

This is a funny post because this was my experience 20 years ago in college. Nothing new from LLMs here. My big takeaway from my experience in different universities (I attended several different ones) is that the content in all the universities is largely the same - the main difference is that you are picking the caliber of your classmates. My classmates in one technical, well-regarded university were MILES beyond the classmates in a local second-tier state university in terms of intelligence, passion, and drive; and those classmates were more attentive and intelligent than the ones in a third-rate community college.

That's what happens when the entire education system is optimized for grades instead of the use and acquisition of knowledge. In this case, LLMs are just laying bare our failings as a society.

no, because before transistors we had vacuum tubes so the functionality of a transistor was well understood and the breakthrough was in size and power consumption.

the analogy would be more apt if tomorrow I could run ChatGPT 4o, the hosted model, on my wrist watch, and run it indefinitely for pennies.

Nope. I did it purely due to long-term intellectual curiosity.

I first pursued "AI" in undergrad during the last AI winter. For example, the only professor who taught neural networks at Purdue was in the EE dept, not CS, and was retiring the semester I was first qualified to study it. There weren't enough seats in the class, and since it was graduate level, I wasn't allowed to take it as an undergrad.

I really tried every avenue I could think of at the time to pursue AI — taking part in Robocup, taking classical AI (also from the EE dept), etc. None of what I was exposed to seemed like it was pushing the the intellectual boundaries, so I instead got into video game AI as a way to pursue AI (a number of famous ML researchers like Demis Hassabis got their start in video games).

When I started my PhD a very tiny group of researchers were looking at text generation, let alone for creative text. The idea was very niche.

Note, I only pursued a PhD after I got an interview at OpenAI in 2017 that made me realize a PhD was likely necessary to pursue research.

There is some truth to it, but it also isn’t exactly accurate. #2 isn’t true for me in its generality. Some new things were exciting and revolutionary, but by no means all. Regarding #3, some new things still excite me today, and many more could excite me, but nobody is making them. Even #1 isn’t accurate. What’s true is that “excitability” goes down over time the more one is aware of the flaws and trade-offs.

I don't think it has to do with age but more than active years of work experience in the field. There is some strong correlation but, I'm 44 and with 3 years of experience I have integrated AI tools in my workflow because they're just tools right now and it would be silly not to leverage it.

> They still can’t decide, but I bet we’ve racked up 1000 coder-hours debating it.

That sounds... Good?

Lots of people run into using whatever is vogue without even thinking twice about it. See the massive move to using cloud for absolutely everything, money be damned, and you'll see what I mean. Cargo culting is a huge issue in the industry.

At least they're actually considering if it's making them more or less productive, compared to the vast majority of the ecosystem.

So you are at a similar level of productivity and have 1000s of hours of free time?

> What is the greatest tool in human history in your opinion?

Language, fire, writing; in that order.

The jump in productivity we had with the world wide web and search engines was several orders of magnitude higher than what you have right now with LLMs, yet I don't remember a single person back in the 2000s calling Google "the greatest tool in human history".

Almost sixty years after ELIZA, chatbots seem to still produce a very strong emotional reaction to some folks.

"Computer" used to be a job title https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

No one says, “Wikipedia knows everything.”

Yeah using vectorization for this seems like bringing a cannon to a duel. At most I would've used levenshtein distance or something

> AI is very open source

ML ecosystem tends to be very open source, true, LLMs a bit less so.

So far there are only a few useful open source models (mostly courtesy of Chinese companies), otherwise a lot of the models are either hidden behind paid APIs or falsely marketed as open source but come attached with terms and conditions, use policies, forbidden uses, requires signing agreements upfront and so on.

The comment you're replying to did not say open source, it said "FOSS"

Completely different thing.

"AI" bs generator is not just the code, it is not reproducible without the training set.

Also the "AI" software is not something that is not possible to use on machine with 100% open-sourced environment: the newest CPU supporting open-source BIOS is 3rd generation of Intel and such an ancient hardware is not able to run it.

So, that kind of LGPB+/Climate Justice/with using artificial intelligence disservices being forced to people are very not open-source. Indeed they are very commercialized.

Hard, imo.

Posts on this forum are not public domain, etc.

That's never going to happen... when has that ever happened?

> Racism is normal

No, it is not. You ever observe small children in a multicultural group? They’re not racist, because they have no concept of it, nor why you’d want to do that. They see each other as peers. Racism is taught.

And them not dying would be an even bigger problem on pretty much every single metric I can think of

I believe it would be a far greater problem if those people didn't die. Aging populations are a huge problem around the globe and unless we'd improve the quality of life to such a margin that octo- and nonagenarians are able to care for each other, I think we're all better off with people dying of old age.

I don't know how to reconcile this point of view, which I understand, with quotes like "science advances one funeral at a time," which I also understand. I understand the individual desire for advancing anti-aging techniques, but it also seems to contain extremely real risks of stagnating our sciences & societies. I can't tell whether anti-aging science is ethical or not.

That puts you way deep in the wishful thinking territory, again there is 0 rational connection between LLMs and immortality, especially if you're already on the way out

Cool, I like sci fi too. Now explain me how many dots I have to create out of thin air to connect LLMs to immortality ?

> The idea is that people can't take new ideas in as they age makes zero sense to me.

Hmm. My counter to this would be that I agree it isn't impossible, but would take such an enormous amount of voluntary effort that no one would spend it to completely update their information about the world.

To give a non-controversial example, take dinosaurs. Almost everyone who grew up before about the year 2000 thinks of dinosaurs as big, scaly lizards, myself included. That's what we were taught, that's what all of our culture showed us, that's what our museums contained. It was the pervasive view for well over a hundred years before we were even born. But now we know that many of them had feathers! This is an uncontroversial fact, but almost everyone currently over the age of 30 is wrong about it, and everyone under the age of 30 has the (currently believed to be) correct view!

Now think about how many other facts we were taught 30+ years ago. Which do we now know are wrong? What cultural beliefs did we learn growing up, that are now outdated and believed to be harmful? What systems do we need to have to update those beliefs? Given current evidence, will those systems actually work? Relearning information and modifying your lifelong habits is really, really hard compared to children learning new information. I don't think the vast majority of people would put in the effort. I think science and culture would stagnate. Death is the process by which we give power to younger people, who have better information to work with than we did. Death is how we make cultural and scientific progress.

While this is something I feel strongly about, I also understand your point of view. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but I think the folks working in longevity fields really need to think about and address these problems before they open Pandora's Box and eliminate natural death. I'm not convinced their work is good for humanity.

I learned that many people seem to share that sentiment, and further details and analogies about it from the discussion thread. It’s learning about others’ opinions, assessments, and thoughts.

Someone might make a little game or fun experiment and might post it on here. Someone might write a blog post that is giving their opinion about a coding paradigm or framework and post it on here. I don't know if in any of those cases I am learning something, but they are still something I expect to see on HN frontpage. At least: I thought they were acceptable. But I guess thats not the case? Only educational things are technically HN worthy? I will take your word for it.

It's just a little bit of a bummer tbh, sometimes I just want to have fun or feel something or read a certain articulation of something... But I have other places I can find that kind of stuff I guess.

Thanks for your reply and your concern for propriety!